Column: The Conservative (Media) Party

If you really don’t care what the media write, you don’t use Ottawaspeak. You don’t say your chief of staff has resigned when he’s really been fired — or vice versa. A man who really couldn’t care less what his critics have to say would answer all questions, tell the truth in plain words and damn the torpedoes.

Stephen Harper is not that man. As Paul Wells of Maclean’s has pointed out, our prime minister is a man who puts a lot of effort into making sure no Conservative ever says the wrong thing — never says anything of substance at all, if he can help it. He’s trained himself and his party to never get into trouble.

And that, ironically, is what’s got him into what might be the worst trouble of his career. This weird, pigtail-pulling obsession with the media is partly to blame for the fact that the Senate scandal became a PMO scandal. It’s not that he doesn’t care what we write. It’s that he cares so much, he and his staff default to scenarios and talking points. It’s become an instinct. Almost everything Harper’s government does — from the tough on crime agenda to his attempts to make certain senators just go away — is media strategy. It’s fiction all the way down. If there was ever a political party in Canada deserving of being called the Media Party, it’s the Conservative Party of Canada in 2013.

Of course, that name’s taken. That’s what the Conservatives and their supporters call us, Canadian journalists, to suggest that we’re a biased herd and therefore irrelevant. This, like everything else, is one element in the Conservative story. They have to pretend they don’t care about the media.

Populists need elites to attack, and conservative populists can’t attack the rich and powerful, because some of them are rich and powerful. So we journalists becomes “elites.” And then the Conservatives tie themselves in knots to show us how much they don’t care about us.

They pen reporters at their party convention and yell at them when they walk in the wrong places. They pay, with taxpayers’ money, armies of public servants to monitor what we do, to take our questions and pass them around by email like hot potatoes for a few hours, before disgorging approved “lines” that, ideally, have ludicrously little to do with said questions. They spend an awful lot of time and energy to make sure we — and by extension, Canadians — get as little information as possible. And then they spend more time and energy writing aggrieved letters to the editor.They openly mock the press: John Baird’s director of communications recently tweeted “The constant whining of the media about access isn’t obnoxious at all. Oh wait — it is.” A director of communications should hold “access” as sacred as any journalist. His goal, in theory, is exactly the same as the media’s goal: to make sure news stories are accurate and informed.

(By the way, the public sneering is all a fiction, too. Conservative MPs and their staff are, almost invariably, nice, decent people who get along great with journalists.)

Faithful Tory senator Marjory LeBreton does her part. In May 2013, several months into the expenses scandal, she said, “I am a Conservative and I know more than most that around this town populated by Liberal elites and their media lickspittles, tut-tutting about our government and yearning for the good old days that we are never given the benefit of the doubt and are rarely given credit for all the good work that we do.”

She loftily declared in 2012, “I don’t read the Ottawa Citizen.”

Oh, that rag? Who cares what they write?

Well, the prime minister, apparently. It was the Citizen’s Glen McGregor who did much of the reporting on Mike Duffy’s expenses and residency, at the end of 2012 and beginning of 2013.

Here’s Duffy’s version of how the prime minister reacted:

“But the attacks from Postmedia continued, and the political heat escalated. So after caucus on Feb. 13th I met the prime minister and Nigel Wright. Just the three of us. I said that despite the smear in the papers, I had not broken the rules. But the prime minister wasn’t interested in explanations or the truth. It’s not about what you did. It’s about the perception of what you did that has been created by the media. The rules are inexplicable to our base.”

I leave it to you to decide whether Duffy’s version of that meeting sounds plausible.

As for the prime minister’s credibility, I leave that to you too. He has said both that Wright resigned and that he “was dismissed.” In Ottawa, this change of terminology hasn’t been that big a deal: after all, everybody knows what it “really” means when a politician says someone has resigned. Nobody even expects it to be true. All that matters, all that ever matters, is how it’ll play on the news.

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